David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We need to first acknowledge a simple truth: the Ministers' Government has no mandate. The policies it will implement in terms of current and capital expenditure and public sector recruitment and pay were roundly rejected by the electorate. They do not even have the support of the majority of Members in the House. The Ministers' roles derive not from the people but from the Fianna Fáil Deputies who sit opposite them in this Chamber. This is called new politics. New politics has to mean new policies. It has to be about changing direction and it has to mean a departure from the old.

I am positive about Ireland’s future, but only if we make the right choices. We all know that political choices are down to us as politicians. It is we who can make those choices. We can choose to give tax cuts to the wealthy or we can invest in public services. We can choose to protect the top 14% of income earners or we can invest in our hospitals and our schools. We can choose to build houses and sustainable communities in the here and now or we can pretend we are putting money away for a rainy day. The choices set out in this summer economic statement fail the fairness test, yet again. We need to move away from the very narrow view that the Irish people exist to serve the economy, when it should be the other way around.

I present the Ministers with the figures from the stability programme update that underpin the summer economic statement. They show total Government revenues as a percentage of GDP dropping from 2017 to 2021, and total expenditure as a percentage of GDP dropping during the same period. While these figures will need to be adjusted, the Minister's dealt with the matter in a disingenuous way. He referred to State-backed capital investment as a percentage of GNP and not State investment as a percentage of GDP. When we factor in the figures, we can see that, as the economy grows, the Government is raising less and spending less as a percentage of GDP. This Fine Gael-Independent Government, propped up by Fianna Fáil, is actively shrinking the State, while issuing press releases stating that this is about building for the future.

These are policies that would make the British Tory party blush.

What can we say about the projections in the summer economic statement and the policies the Government is ready to impose on the people? It means more pressure on our health system, more patients lying on hospital trolleys, more band aid solutions and more missed targets as impossible budgets are allocated to hospitals in order to force the increased privatisation of the system. It means more pressure on our education system which is already running at undercapacity even before demographic pressures and international standards on classroom sizes are factored in. It means more pressure on housing and infrastructure as communities and businesses grow but have to do so within reduced capacity.

Capital investment is one of the key issues, indeed possibly the key issue, that we are faced with today. When we think about capital investment, we usually think of roads, infrastructure and the mechanisms that facilitate trade and business activity but capital investment is also houses, health and education. Usually, when these issues are raised in public debate, they are talked about as expenditure, as a cost, as if housing serves the same social and economic purpose as shopping online. It does not. When we build houses, when we increase capacity in our health service and when we lower class sizes, we are investing in the future. That is the big difference between building an economy and building a society. This is why, after nine years of chronic underinvestment in these areas, after the bank bailout of Fianna Fáil and the unequal austerity measures of Fine Gael and the Labour Party, we have in Ireland today a chorus of diverse voices all calling for the same thing, namely, public investment in social and economic infrastructure.

We hear it from IBEC which in a briefing last week said that the current fiscal rules should take on board the unique demographic pressures we face and the associated need for capital investment. It said that Ireland had access to the cheapest money in history and should be able to borrow to spend on badly needed infrastructure. IBEC is saying this. It then went on to say that it was unconcerned about the associated rise in national debt as capital investment taps into a wider economic dynamic. We will leave to one side my astonishment at IBEC suddenly advocating public investment after being supply-side cheerleaders for so long but on this issue IBEC is right. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has also called for greater investment over tax cuts for the elites, for the wealthy and for the top 14%. Patricia King said recently that investing in quality public services like health and education will boost economic growth, achieve a better quality of life for all citizens and help create a more equal society. She said that these services should be funded through a system of fair and progressive taxation and in this she is correct.

We also had the European Commission calling for greater capital investment. It said in its country report in February of this year that, "the current levels of capital expenditure in Ireland are barely sufficient to replace the existing stock of public capital" and that, "Ireland is now witnessing the emergence of capacity constraints in public infrastructure." It has no confidence that we are investing correctly in capital investment.

This is not news to the people of Ireland. When Fine Gael took it upon itself in the last election, very foolishly, to tell the Irish people to keep the recovery going, it got a very harsh lesson in what happens when one believes one's own spin and bluster. There has been a modest recovery, and we recognise that, but the reality is that the vast majority of Irish households do not feel it because it is not in their wages and it is not in services. There are more people working but they are working in low-pay jobs with high social cost overheads. The Minister said the previous Government's approach to expenditure reductions was a targeted one and how right he is. The top 14% were cosseted and protected and not one cent of extra income tax was sought from them while those who rely on our public services, those who rely on our hospitals and our schools, those people now on hospital trolleys and the 2,000 children now sleeping in emergency accommodation are victims of the Minister's targeted approach, which was cut after cut after cut in public services. People are now seeing the true cost of that.

We live in a State where essential public services have been downgraded or privatised in order to pay for tax breaks for high earners and to provide investment opportunities for private corporations in waste, health, education, housing and water. After 2018, the Government is going to start saving for a rainy day, or so the spin goes. How many families have to be put up in hotels for the Government to see that, for many, it is already raining on them, and very heavily?

I now turn to public sector pay and pensions. As the Minister is well aware, the FEMPI Acts need to be unwound. This process has begun under the Lansdowne Road agreement, which runs out in 2018. A new collective agreement would need to be put in place to finally shut down FEMPI and yet there is no recognition of this fact in the summer statement, not one single mention of what happens post-2018 except for the establishment of a commission to make recommendations. When I questioned the Minister on this yesterday, he said that it was not his job to pre-empt any possible new collective agreement to replace the Lansdowne Road agreement, especially as that would be a bad negotiating strategy. What type of strategy is it that says that when one is working out a new pay deal, one puts €1 billion a year on the table, not just once or twice but three times for a rainy day, but no provision at all for increased public sector pay? What type of strategy is it to argue for the continuation of economic emergency legislation by announcing €5 billion in tax cuts over five years because the emergency is, according to the Minister, over? This Government has just announced more than €8 billion in tax cuts and unspent revenue over five years but says this has no influence on its negotiating position with public sector unions. I can imagine public sector unions scratching their heads at such a strategy. Astonishingly, there is no provision for pay equalisation in the statement. The Minister made passing reference to it in his speech today but no longer can this State stand over a two-tier pay structure in the public service. No longer can the sore that there is in classrooms and hospitals continue. If the Minister believes in the principle of equal pay for equal work, he has a responsibility to deal with this issue but there is no mention of it in this statement.

We recognise that provisions have to made for the winding down of FEMPI. Sinn Féin's recent Ard-Fheis recognised that public service workers play a vital role in our society and yet many of the newer entrants have been penalised by the two-tier pay structure brought in by the last Fine Gael-Labour Party Government. Sinn Féin will continue to support the demand that this unfair two-tier system be replaced with a fairer system that rewards people based on their work and is not defined by when they began their career. It is Sinn Féin's view that FEMPI needs to be unwound in an equitable and structured way, with emphasis on low to middle income workers before those on more than €65,000 who are already due to receive significant elements of pay restoration under the Lansdowne Road agreement due to the unwinding of the Haddington Road agreement.

On a deeper note, there is an intentional sleight of hand here in these figures. For the years 2017 and 2018, the net fiscal space is exclusive of public sector pay restoration. However, for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, no provision is made for future pay restoration. This is not net fiscal space for those three years. It is, in fact, a sleight of hand and an attempt to make the figures look rosier than they actually are. The Minister has to be straight with people and clear with public sector workers. He has to give them hope that he will do the right thing and that there will be further restoration in 2019, 2020 and 2021 for those on low and middle incomes in the public sector. He knows that is the reality but he has left it out of this because he wants to distort the figures and pretend that this is net fiscal space when, in reality, it is not.

It has to be pointed out that Government's policies, as outlined in the summer economic statement, are extremely short-sighted, as well as ideological. The Minister is committed to shrinking public services and to tax cuts for the wealthy and high earners and is committed to outsourcing as much of the State as he possibly can. He does it with a smile but it is his intention, nevertheless. In Sinn Féin, we stand against all of this and we stand with the ordinary people of Ireland. We stand with low to middle income workers, 77% of whom earn less than €50,000 a year.

There are alternatives and every year we in Sinn Féin have put forward costed, fair and deliverable alternatives.

We publish policy documents on child care, housing and health. We are the only party that has set out a costed route to a genuinely universal health system. Others talk about it but we have costed it and have set out a strategy that would lead us to a fair, equitable health service for the first time. Sinn Féin holds the fundamental belief that inability to pay should not deny access or the opportunity to lead a full, long and healthy life. In order to have universal health care, we need to increase capacity in the system and progressively replace private spending by members of the public with public spending.

Sinn Féin believes that one of the fundamental rights in any society is the right to a home. That is why in our election manifesto, we committed ourselves to building 100,000 social and affordable homes, which is what needs to happen. I have heard an awful lot of spin since the election from this current Government about what it may or may not do about housing. What people outside this Chamber need is real action and not rhetoric and not more false promises but I do not see that reflected in this statement.

I will finish as I started. New politics is old wine in new bottles unless it means new policies and a change of course. The Minister talks about new politics and he says he wants to listen to us on this side of the Chamber and yet what we see before us mapped out for the next five years is more of the same - more of the same neoliberal economic policies, more of the same tax cuts for those at the top who do not need them and no real hope for those who depend on public services, those on trolleys, those in emergency accommodation and those living in poverty. We, in Sinn Féin, provide that hope and I do not believe that what has been presented to us today is the fair way to manage our economy over the next five years.

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